Schocked
How the Washington Post Style section brought down a Congressman
Today, we’re used to members of Congress spewing incendiary comments on cable television and Twitter, saying and doing ever more outrageous things to make the news cycle. For these folks, the performance is the point. But, not too long ago, the House of Representatives had an altogether different kind of star.
Fifteen years ago, a millennial came to Congress and realized that generating nonstop, fawning press coverage, and cultivating a following on Instagram, was more useful (and a lot more fun) than slogging away on the backbench hoping to get noticed.
His name was Aaron Schock.
When Schock was elected in 2008, he was, at 27, the youngest member of Congress and the first person to sit in the House who was born in the 1980s. His ascent was as charmed as it was rapid.
He won a school board seat at 19 with 60% of the vote. In 2004, when he was 23, Schock defeated incumbent Democrat Ricca Slone for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives by just 235 votes. It was his last tough election.
He all but floated into federal office, succeeding Ray LaHood in the House of Representatives in 2008 with 59% of the vote. The only hiccup in an otherwise textbook campaign was a fundraising visit by President George W. Bush that cost the city of Peoria more than $38,000. He only paid the city back after the tab generated a wave of negative publicity.
Once in office, Schock was charming, young, and very good-looking. He was featured on the cover of Men’s Health. He was named “hottest Congressman” by The Huffington Post. He was even a guest judge on Top Chef. And he was great at Instagram. No one noticed that he introduced more legislation in his first year than any other House freshman.
You couldn’t miss his love of travel. His more than 18,000 Instagram followers (who now number almost 48,000) were treated to pictures of Schock on glaciers and in Hawai’i. There was Schock at the Great Wall of China and meeting Pope Francis. We saw so much of Schock that people started to wonder who was paying for it all.
The end of this story begins with a photo shoot. At some point in 2015, Aaron decided that the beige walls of the Rayburn Building just wouldn’t do anymore. So, he redecorated with the help of an interior design firm called Euro Trash which was owned by a constituent named Annie Brahler.
It turns out that Aaron from Peoria had such great taste that the old media - specifically The Washington Post - wanted to cover it. Annie Brahler was happy to show the reporters around.
That turned out to be a big mistake. An article in the paper’s Style section raised plenty of questions - and not just about color choices. Congress is notoriously stingy with redecoration budgets; new members get to choose between a few set paint colors - beige, eggshell, light blue, light grey, and light yellow - and the furniture is usually hand-me-downs from other members checked out of a central storage room. Anything else must be paid for by the member personally. Downton Abbey it’s not. How did Schock pay for such a lavish redecoration?
That question was just the tip of the iceberg for a congressman with incredibly extravagant (and well-documented) tastes. After some digging, reporters uncovered that Schock had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in unreported campaign donations for private planes, five-star hotels, and concert tickets. The office decor was improperly claimed as expenses and paid for by his campaign fund, not Schock himself. His home in Illinois mysteriously sold for an absurd above-market price to a campaign donor. Then, on March 16, 2015, Politico reported that Schock had claimed mileage reimbursement for 170,000 miles on his car, even though when the car was sold it had just 80,000 miles on the odometer.
He resigned from Congress 12 hours later.
In the end, Aaron Schock is probably the only Congressman ever brought down by the Washington Post Style section. There’s an old WWII poster that reads “Loose lips sink ships”. They sink members of Congress too.
In 2016, he was indicted on 24 counts of wire fraud and theft of government funds for improperly claiming expenses for crystal chandeliers, blood-red walls, a plume of pheasant feathers, and a whole bunch of mileage. He paid $42,000 in fines to the IRS and $68,000 back to his campaign. After paying restitution, the federal charges were dropped in 2019.
Aaron Schock’s career turned out to be one giant, well-groomed missed opportunity. He entered office as the standard-bearer of a generation who could have championed any one of the hundreds of grave issues facing his peers - from crushing student loan debt to education to jobs to entrepreneurship. Instead, he focused on surfing and wall sconces. In disgrace, he’s likely to be best remembered - if he’s remembered at all - for being entirely unserious.
It turns out that Shock’s best life was ahead of him outside of Congress. In March 2020, just as the coronavirus was about to lock down the country, he came out as gay. He spent most of the pandemic flouting coronavirus restrictions in Mexico and Brazil.
And then he was gone. Aaron Schock, the Instagram congressman, essentially vanished. No more shirtless pics from Ibiza and Puerto Vallarta or shots of him hanging off glaciers. His last post, about a real estate project, was six months ago.
As for the office, presumably, it’s been redecorated. But it lives on in all of its red and gilt glory on the Euro Trash website.